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Mira Ying

write , cooperation , Publication , Media , movie , Design , Artistic research , Archives

Mira Ying is an interdisciplinary artist and researcher based in Rotterdam and Shanghai. Working across moving images, publishing, interfaces, and daily objects, she critically examines various forms of knowledge-making infrastructure, investigating materials and social systems through which ideology is shaped, circulated, or manipulated.

Strange Characters
Strange Characters - mixed media installation with wood, glass, and e-paper device, shown in the “bOre” exhibition at Art House - United Cowboys, Eindhoven, 2025. This is part of an ongoing research project in collaboration with Alice Wan and Seewhy Ng, examining the migration of letterpress materials from Asia to Europe under 19th-century colonial trade and proposing a critical reading of the power dynamics behind world knowledge-making obscured by the Eurocentric rhetoric of multiculturalism. Historical moments were illustrated through a 10-minute montage of archive images on the e-paper display. These shots and their ghosting negatives form a sequence indexed by a list of Chinese antonym pairs in the 1886 Dutch-Chinese dictionary, offering a dialectic reading into archive materials that are preserved by authorities: one that sees colonial impositions within the image of cultural exchange and resistance within the image of violence.
Rights of Passage(s)
Rights of Passage(s) - mixed media installation with steel, nylon, packaging materials, stationery, mirrors, and e-paper devices, 2025. Rights of Passage(s) examines a pervasive yet invisible border regime that shapes contemporary cultural production, as reflected in the fragmented practices of autonomous diasporic publishing. Operating under the ideological, capitalist and institutional forces that regulate movement, access and visibility, these strategies do not seek to overturn the porous border infrastructure but rather to critically inhabit it, leveraging its divisive and connective functions to sustain temporary spaces for alternative knowledge-making. Through re-assembly and annotation, the installation turns sites of creation, logistics and dissemination into testimonies against the illusion of borderless cultural circulation, attempting to form a mental space that facilitates cognitive mapping of the borderscape. Everyday tools of autonomous publishing are reconfigured into sculptural objects, held in tension with the firm structure by soft nylon straps. Slow-moving images on e-paper devices embed annotations in plain sight, exploiting the technical limitations to protect anonymity while underlining the critical inhabitation in the global cultural supply system as a dialectic mode of resistance.
The Prosthetic Memory
The Prosthetic Memory - film essay, 6 min, first screening at Melted Film Festival, 2024. This choreography of archive footage delves into the pivotal role of women as the memory extension to the machine in the history of computing and automation. From astrophotography analysis to early computing, from operating weaving looms to punching cards, from the automated office to the modern kitchen, they traversed the boundaries of intersecting work domains and power structures while maintaining a common identity of trivialized labor. The film weaves together fragmented threads from educational and promotional films like the ones from IBM, NASA, AT&T and Linotype, among other documents mostly made available by authorities. While institutional archives bear the predicament of being a registry of power, this is an intervention that aims to work with them and through them – treat them as sites of evidence, find patterns underneath their matter-of-factness, and republish new stories from them.
The Feed Factor
The Feed Factor - mixed media installation with steel, printed matter, and moving images. Shown at the “Soils” Exhibition, Van Abbemuseum, 2024. “The Feed Factor” investigates the design and application of animal feed pellets in the Netherlands, which has been a major contributor to the nitrification of soil. Combining fieldwork and archival research, the work articulates the modularity logic shared by the feed pellets, post-war land reformation policies, the “new building” concrete factories, and the formulated supplements consumed by humans. They are connected by the same questionable promise of modernity that is based on overproduction and a constructed rationale of optimal performance.

NoR Festival 2026: Below (Between (Upon (Within)))

Date:
Location: Tuinderslust VTV
In association with: Xiao Yu, Yu Yin

NoR Festival 2026: Below (Between (Upon (Within))) reimagines allotment gardens as a living and decentralized network, reflecting on their infrastructure, histories, and micro-ecologies. We present an in-progress essay film, “Time, in a Volkstuin”, which traces the connection between land and people at Tuinderslust, a 91-year-old allotment garden in Rotterdam, and re-examines its aesthetics through a socio-economic lens.

https://www.instagram.com/p/DcBUsFcjQb5

Upward Suspension

Date:
Location: Foundation We Are
In association with: YeWang Studio

“Upward Suspension” is an experimental kite-making relay that aims to bring interruption and critical reflections into a cultural ecosystem that internalizes meritocratic values ​​of upward mobility, growth, reward, and optimized performance. The workshop combines traditional craft, social design, experimental publishing and public-making to explore an accessible artistic intervention that one can exercise on a daily basis.

https://www.instagram.com/p/DYe3YfJDFqU

Pecha Kucha talk: autonomous publishing, taking root on the move

Date:
Location: Nieuwe Instituut

Presented at Graphic Design Fair 2026 as part of the programs around the exhibition FUNGI: Anarchist Designers, the talk brings unique perspectives from East Asia on autonomous art publishing practice and self-organization, opening dialogues around building collaborative and resilient ecosystems for culture makers.

https://nieuweinstituut.nl/en/events/graphic-design-fair-2026

Reading session: Maintenance, Methods, Moves

Date:
Location: Foundation We Are
In association with: Chloé Terrée, Elevator Radio

“Maintenance, Methods, Moves” is an ongoing interview series with artists and designers who run resilient self-publishing projects and organize distinctive publishing events/spaces in the Asian diaspora. The reading session looks into how they negotiate rights of passage within ideological and institutional frameworks in both Eastern and Western contexts and discuss how to build trans-local and rhizomatic infrastructures that hold a safe space together.

https://www.instagram.com/p/DVYVSvMDfrQ/
This artist has no awards yet.